ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

The Artist of the Year award annually recognizes an individual, established in their field, who has displayed significant and enduring artistic contributions to the region, and provides support for them to create a new body of work for exhibition. This year’s winner, Atticus Adams, is a sculptor whose work embodies the transformative power of art to create beauty, meaning, and emotional impact from industrial materials. Inspired by memories, Adams creates fine art by using aluminum, bronze, copper, and stainless steel mesh – materials generally found in screen doors/windows or filters. His abstract pieces range from installations to set and costume design, sculptural work, clouds and other natural phenomena.

Atticus Adams isn’t afraid to revisit his childhood memories. Born in Oregon, but raised in West Virginia, Adams speaks often, with a soft, Southern twang, of summers spent at his grandmother’s house. The green apples and salt she would prepare in the August heat, playing with the dress linings in her fashion trunks or the look of the weathered screen ofher porch door all appear as oblique references in his work. Adams’ memories  and sculptures take on the Faulkner-like saga of summers in Appalachia: soft silk weeds that float above wild, overgrown grass, floral petals tilted from a summer rain or the algae-like creatures from mountain streams and creeks. His chosen material of metal and copper is durable but porous, nimble but sharp. Like his malleable, but prickly materials, Adams carries himself with a mixture of Southern hospitality and the strength of a generation of pioneers.

Pink Poodle, the title of the show, is also pulled from Adams’ memory bank, but unlike the warm and soothing memories of his grandmother’s house, this work was born from a painful memory with his father at a county fair. Adams’ recalls the event well. His father proudly won him a stuffed poodle, but just as Adams filled with secret joy, imagining walking away with a pink poodle underarm, his hopes were dashed as his father shoved the blue version into his little hands. Adams kept his wish for the pink poodle and his queer desires to himself for decades. In his large-scale installation of pink poppies, poodles and airy sculptures, this moment of shame and rejection has been transformed into a warm dream.